Auschwitz and Birkenau

By Ian Baxter

A pictorial history of the two Nazi-German World War II concentration camps in Poland, featuring rare photographs from wartime archives.

Auschwitz and Birkenau were separated from each other by about a forty-five-minute walk. Auschwitz was adapted to hold political prisoners in 1940 and evolved into a killing machine in 1941. Later that year a new site called Birkenau was found to extend the Auschwitz complex. Here a vast complex of buildings was constructed to hold initially Russian POWs and later Jews as a labor pool for the surrounding industries including IG Farben. Following the January 1943 Wannsee Conference, Birkenau evolved into a murder factory using makeshift houses which were adapted to kill Jews and Russian POWs. Later due to sheer volume Birkenau evolved into a mass killing machine using gas chambers and crematoria, while Auschwitz, which still held prisoners, became the administrative center.

The images show first Auschwitz main camp and then Birkenau and are carefully chosen to illustrate specific areas, like the Women’s Camp, Gypsy Camp, SS quarters, Commandant’s House, railway disembarkation, the “sauna,” disinfection area, and the Crematoria. Maps covering Auschwitz and Birkenau explain the layout.

This book is shocking proof of the scale of the Holocaust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473856882

Ian Baxter

Ian Baxter is a military historian who specialises in German twentieth-century military history. He has written more than fifty books. He has also reviewed numerous military studies for publication, supplied thousands of photographs and important documents to various publishers and film production companies worldwide, and lectures to various schools, colleges and universities throughout the United Kingdom and Southern Ireland.

Book preview

Phase I

Auschwitz I

(Main Camp)

The German authorities quickly pressed forward to establish various camps in Poland where Polish prisoners could be incarcerated and set to work as stonebreakers and construction workers for buildings and streets. It was envisaged that these Poles would remain as a slave labour force, and it was therefore deemed necessary to erect these so called ‘quarantine camps’ in order to subdue the local population. Initially, it had been proposed that the quarantine camps were to hold the prisoners until they were sent to the various other concentration camps in the Reich. However, it soon became apparent that this purpose was impracticable so it was approved that these camps were to function as a permanent prison for all those that were unfortunate enough to have been sent there.

On 21 February 1940 a former labour exchange and artillery barracks near a small district town in Poland called Oświęcim had been deemed suitable for the so-called quarantine camps. The site was to be run by SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Höss, and he was told that the camp should serve as a regional dumping ground for all Polish political prisoners so all these ‘undesirables’ could be transferred at a moment’s notice to camps in the west as slave labourers.

The town of Oświęcim itself was situated in a remote corner of south-western Poland, in a marshy valley where the Sola River flows into the Vistula about 35 miles west of the ancient city of Kraków.

The location for the camp was a former Polish barracks. The accommodation consisted of eight two-storey and fourteen single-storey brick barracks framing the north and south sides of a large exercise yard which were able to be transformed into a prison camp with extra buildings. The location for the site was also deemed well situated for Auschwitz as it had very good railway connections and was isolated from outside observation. Although the water supply was polluted and there were mosquitoes everywhere, the Germans would be able to transform these swamped and infested marshes along the Vistula and Sola Rivers into what they envisaged as a valuable outpost of the Reich.

On 27 April, plans were approved for the construction and adaptation of the new site at Auschwitz. It was also agreed that it would house around 10,000 prisoners. On 4 May, Rudolf Höss was officially named as commandant of the new camp.

In order to construct and transform the new camp and adapt the twenty brick barracks for the inmates, Höss had been given a construction budget of 2 million Reich Marks. With this generous allowance he would be given the task of cleaning the existing barracks for the guards, rebuilding the two barracks outside the fence into officers’ quarters and a hospital for the garrison, building a barrack for the Blockführer at the gate, constructing eight guard towers around the perimeter of the camp, building a hayloft, installing a crematorium in the abandoned powder magazine building, and tidying the three-storey house on the edge of the existing camp in order to make it habitable for him and his family. Initially Höss took up residence in a hotel overlooking the Auschwitz station while his family home was prepared. Here he would ponder on the future plans for the construction of the camp and spend ‘all his waking hours’ overseeing the developments.

During May and early June, construction of the camp progressed relatively slowly, but a fence with second-hand barbed wire was soon being installed around the perimeter, and new buildings began to be constructed. At the entrance of Auschwitz, Höss had a new steel gate forged in a hurriedly-built workshop and a frame built. Emblazoned along the top of the gate frame he had the inscription erected that he liked so much at Dachau: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – ‘Work Makes You Free’.

Throughout the early phase of building, more SS men were recruited as guards, and by 20 May, fifteen SS men arrived from the cavalry unit stationed in Kraków and were soon installed as part of the camp’s guard garrison. During June an additional hundred SS were sent to reinforce the guard garrison along with SS officers and NCOs of various ranks.

The Auschwitz transit camp was gradually taking shape, but was far from completed. With the construction work barely begun, on 14 June a passenger train steamed into Auschwitz station from Tarnow prison carrying on board 728 political prisoners.

Throughout July and early August work continued on the camp, including the modification of the former powder magazine store, which started about 5 July. Its primary use was to be a crematorium, but was initially seen as being for delousing purposes. Before the crematorium was in operation those that died were transported to Gliwice and incinerated in the municipal crematorium. The conversion of the crematorium was undertaken by the full authorisation of the SS construction management. In fact, even before Höss had taken up his new post at Auschwitz the installation of a crematorium had already been decided. J.A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, a company with a section specialising in the manufacture and installation of crematorium furnaces, headed by the chief engineer Kurt Prüfer, had been commissioned to undertake the first drawings. The plans showed the first furnace to be installed and gave full details of the internal structure. Schlachter, the camp’s architect, had himself already obtained extensive information on the technology on the double muffler system, and the coke-heated furnace. He discussed this new equipment with Höss and the camp officials, and plans for its installation were agreed with SS headquarters in Berlin. Höss was in total agreement with the building of the crematorium at his new camp. After all, he looked upon the incineration of those who died at the camp as the simplest method to make the environment more hygienic.

The conversion of the building into a crematorium in July was undertaken relatively quickly, considering the lack of building materials at the camp. The installation consisted of one entrance on the northwest side and included a furnace room with two incinerators and a charnel house. The concrete roof was flat and the building was surrounded on three sides by earth embankments with openings for the window of the coke plant. There were two windows in the furnace room, which were installed to cool down the inside temperature of the building. An external chimney had been built and was connected to the furnaces by underground flues. The entrance to the crematorium was camouflaged by a very large concrete wall that enclosed the courtyard with two enormous wooden gates. In order to conceal the crematorium from view a one-storey building housing the SS hospital was constructed nearby along with the camp workshops and the barracks of the political department.

Besides the transformation of the former powder magazine store into a crematorium, work continued on various other buildings both inside and outside the camp. In order to speed the completion of the camp they desperately required building supplies. An order was sent